Research, development and demonstration concerning pedestrian and bicycle roads. An account of VTIs competence and resources

The present report presents, partly, the collected VTI research on the "functional properties" of pedestrian and bicycle roads, and partly a survey of what has been done in this field outside of VTI. The term "functional property" has been interpreted in a broad sense, and basically everything connected with bicycle roads and bicycle traffic is included in the VTI literature review, which is the major part of the report. The operating environment analysis is made on the basis of the discussions from a seminar held at VTI, December 12, 2005, and complemented with literature reviews. The possibilities to build an instrumented vehicle for measuring bicycle roads, and the relevant properties of an evenness index, were discussed at the seminar. In the literature review, the research of VTI has been divided into five parts: traffic safety, maintenance and operation, mode choice, measurement of cycle flow, and the umbrella part "others". The research concerning traffic safety dominates, both at VTI and elsewhere. One of the conclusions from the project is that VTI should try to get funding to develop a measuring vehicle for cycleway surfaces. There is also a need to develop the unreliable methods used today (elastic tube and induction coil) to count bicycle traffic (A). This document is also available at http://www.vti.se/EPiBrowser/Publikationer/R539.pdf